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Creative Writers

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ABOUT THE CLUB

If you’re a writer of any kind, Monash Creative Writers is the club for you! Short stories, fanfic, comics, epic 2000-line poems: we’re just a welcoming community of writers that wants to read your stuff and support you! Come to our weekly meetings to get feedback on your work and learn about writing; previously we’ve had presentations on character creation, getting published, vampires in literature, and more. No stress if you prefer not to share your writing: feel free to come along and just chill.

We periodically publish an anthology, Incisors & Grinders, so watch out for our next call for submissions! We also share resources to help you publish your pieces elsewhere. Our other events include: poetry/performance nights, trivia nights, Write Day, and an annual winter writers' retreat. Come along, meet your fellow writers, and make some great friends!

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/MonashCreativeWriters/ Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/MonashWriters/

Aims & Objectives

The aims and objectives of the club include to: (i) aid members in the in the creation of original works of textual fiction; (ii) discuss and critique works of fiction from both the club and elsewhere; and (iii) form a community of mutual support and fellowship based on creative endeavours.

Annual Membership (MSA Card)

Annual membership (non msa card).

https://www.facebook.com/MonashCreativeWriters/

http://www.twitter.com/monashwriters

Dhanushka Perera

gro.sbulchsanom@sretirwevitaerc

https://incisorsgrinders.wordpress.com/

  • Subject guides
  • Literary Studies
  • Creative Writing

Literary Studies: Creative Writing

  • Finding books
  • Reference works
  • Literary Theory
  • Literatures in English
  • Children's literature and fairy tales
  • Book reviews

Organisations and journals

  • Australian literary journals (writing submissions)
  • Writing events & organisations
  • Australian Author
  • Australian Book Review
  • Going Down Swinging
  • Griffith Review
  • Kill Your Darlings
  • Australian Council of the Arts
  • Emerging Writers' Festival
  • Melbourne Writers' Festival
  • The Wheeler Centre
  • Writers Victoria

Selected guides and directories

The Handbook of Creative Writing book cover

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Master of Arts (Creative Writing)

Course code: 3773 ~ Course abbreviation: MA(CreatWrit) ~ 2 years full-time, 4 years part-time ~ Managing faculty: Arts

Study mode and course location

On-campus (Clayton)

Course description

The MA in Creative Writing is offered by 100 per cent research. At the completion of the course, candidates will be required to submit for examination a component of their own creative writing.

For the purpose of this course, `a component of creative writing' will be a novel or a novella or a group of short stories or a play or a group of plays or a sequence of poems of a portfolio of creative works of various genres. The creative writing component submitted for examination as part of the thesis must be undertaken during the enrolment in the MA, under supervision. The `exegesis' will constitute a scholarly, self-reflexive critique, based on research into the theory and practice of the creative process focused on the student's creative writing component, the writing of which will itself be considered as an act of research into the nature of literary creativity. The exegesis will involve thoroughly researching the various aspects of the creative writing project: the creative process, the characteristics of the attempted genre, the mechanics of handling language and narrative, the influence of other relevant writers, context, and the shaping elements in a work of art.

Grades for the award of a research masters degree

The minimum pass grade for masters by research is 60 C (credit). There are three qualifying grades: honours 2B (60-69), honours 2A (70-79) and honours 1 (80-100).

Course structure

Course requirements.

At the completion of the course, candidates will be required to submit for examination a component of their own creative writing of 20,000 to 25,000 words, together with a critical explanation (an `exegesis') of 10,000 to 15,000 words, the combined word total normally not to exceed 40,000 words or be less than 30,000 words. Approval may be given to a candidate to write a creative work component of more than 25,000 words when that greater length is appropriate to the genre. However, in this event, the exegesis must still remain at the prescribed length of 10,000 to 15,000 words. Approval should be sought at the time of the review of candidature.

Contact details

Refer to discipline entry in the `Areas of study' section.

Course coordinator

Dr Chandani Lokuge

Monash Student Association

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creative writing at monash

Creative Writers, Monash

We are a writing community that encourages our members to write in all forms! We give talks about writing topics and provide feedback for each other's work at weekly meetings. We publish our members' work online and in print, run a yearly winter writers' retreat, spoken word events, and more!

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Creative Writing Prize

  • Xu, Hui (Recipient)
  • Chinese Studies

Prize : Prize (including medals and awards)

Description

Monash University Publishing

A reflection on The Shelf Life of Zora Cross by Vanessa Berry

creative writing at monash

This interweaving of writing and life is at the heart of literary biography. Writers exist in multiple: their written work, their identities as public figures and their private lives. Many readers will discover Zora, who has been a neglected figure in Australian literary history, for the first time in reading Shelf Life . The book’s inventive structure, focusing on the story of Zora’s life and work through the relationships that sustained, drove and influenced her, show how strongly she was enmeshed in Australian cultural and literary life, even if her name is not widely known today.

With Shelf Life , Perkins has brought Zora Cross to new generations of readers, and taken us into not only Zora’s life and literary works, but also into the archives, locations and personal connections that preserve her traces. This, to me, was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the book – following the paper trail of Zora’s life through newspapers, letters and manuscripts, entering the archives with Perkins as she pieces Zora’s life story together.

In one of the early chapters the phrase ‘material legacy’ stood out to me. It’s used in reference to the collection of letters received from authors by critic and editor Bertram Stevens: Zora’s letters to him, as Perkins describes, are intimate outpourings and have the effect of a diary as much as correspondence:

They’re not business letters, nor are they love letters; often they read more like a diary. Because many are undated, the order in the volume is mixed up, so the sense of intimacy begins on the first page. These outpourings chart Zora’s progress from a teacher who writes in the evenings, to a touring actress who writes on trains and mountain tops, to a recognised author who writes all the time. They are ‘notorious and shocking’, she admits, because she writes with a lack of inhibition caused by youth, grief and distance.

I thought about Zora writing these letters – the intensity of her communication, most likely without thought of the words ever being read by anyone beyond the recipient. Those who have done archival research involving personal letters will know the odd, otherworldly feeling of reading them. It is like listening in on a private conversation, but also listening back through time. In Shelf Life , Perkins draws on the energy and intimacy of these letters, and in doing so she brings these qualities to our reading.

While reading Shelf Life , I thought of a line from Beverley Farmer, who wrote in 1987, reflecting on her reading of The Persimmon Tree by Marjorie Barnard, ‘It means very much to me, the invisible network of women reading each other’s work and cherishing it.’ The idea of the ‘invisible network’ has stuck with me, and came up when I was reading Shelf Life , which is very much about visibility, about networks and about women writers, including the kinds of relationships that come about between women who write. I thought particularly of Zora and Perkins here, and the relationship they have across time. Here there is a relationship between a biographer and her subject, but also a relationship between women and between writers.

In Shelf Life , we are also led to consider how Zora’s memory and legacy have both persisted and become hidden. I’m sure all of us have wondered, at some point in our lives, what of us might remain into the future, after we have passed away. How might we persist in social or cultural memory? One way is through our families: our children and their descendants. Zora lives on in her family – her grandchildren and their children. Another way that our legacy persists is through our work: the books we might write, trees we might plant, students we might teach, ideas we might shape, decisions we might make that go on to impact the future.

Writers are given to wondering what of their words might live on into the future – some more than others, as we see in Shelf Life (I love the image of the 97-year-old Dame Mary Gilmore at the very end of her life, asking her niece, ‘Has everything gone to the Mitchell?’) As a writer who has manuscripts in the State Library collection I sometimes wonder who might, potentially, in a century’s time request to look at them, and the books and artworks that I have made. The thought of these works living on after I am gone, having captured something of life in Sydney in the early twenty-first century, reminds me of the power of writing to connect us across time, and that writing can be a way of speaking to the future.

As we gather here in the library tonight we might cast our imaginations back 100 years, to think of Zora Cross in the Mitchell Library reading room, researching her lectures on Australian literature for Sydney Teacher’s College. Or the student Zora, coming to the library in the evenings to read and study. We might think of Zora’s books and her letters in boxes in the stacks. Then returning to the present, we celebrate Cathy Perkins’s The Shelf Life of Zora Cross, which has allowed us to enter so richly into the life of this prolific and inspiring writer.

Dr Vanessa Berry, writer, artist and lecturer, University of Sydney

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3940 - Doctor of Philosophy (Creative Writing)

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  13. Creative Writers

    ABOUT THE CLUB. If you're a writer of any kind, Monash Creative Writers is the club for you! Short stories, fanfic, comics, epic 2000-line poems: we're just a welcoming community of writers that wants to read your stuff and support you! Come to our weekly meetings to get feedback on your work and learn about writing; previously we've had ...

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